The vibrant state of Aboriginal intellectual life is immediately evident upon reading Melissa Lucashenko’s foreword and Daniel Browning’s introduction to his Close to the Subject: Selected works. Lucashenko combines insight with an engaging, colloquial style; Browning, without apology or artifice, weighs up the successes, failures, and resentments of almost three decades as a journalist.

Legacy media and talkback radio were still all-powerful when Browning commenced at the ABC as a cadet journalist in 1994. Entering a jealous, competitive work environment he finds his race and sexuality are fetishised by some of his white colleagues and used to diminish him as a person and a professional. In what used to be referred to as lateral violence, an Aboriginal colleague greets him with a ‘vampiric half-smile’, occasionally hailing him as ‘countryman’, with an emphasis on the first syllable. Faced with this Succession-like ruthlessness Browning admits, ‘Instead of unmaking the craft to fit my own values, I had learned bitterness and self-protection just to survive.’

What unfolds as we read the introduction is an image of a proud, sensitive man who acknowledges that he ‘didn’t rise above the slurs or bullying’. Is it better now? Maybe not for Browning. It still seems to rankle him that he has never been nominated for a Walkley Award. He writes of an unsolicited approach from a university headhunter who holds out the tantalising possibility of a prestigious appointment, commensurate with his achievements, as a professor of journalism. Daring to dream, Browning envisages teaching a subject that would introduce students to the ethical responsibilities of reporting on Indigenous issues. He eventually learns that at some higher level the appointment is vetoed.